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Maximilien Robespierre

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"Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue."

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Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre (6 May 1758  28 July 1794) was a major figure of The French Revolution. To this very day, he remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of France and Europe.

When Louis XVI convened the meeting of the Estates-General, Robespierre (a scholarship boy and rising attorney who had taken "pro-bono cases") became one of the many young deputies who found a career in political office open to them for the first time. Later he was among the signatories of the Tennis Court Oath. In the National Assembly, Robespierre became notable for criticizing limited suffrage and for condemning a constitutional defense of slavery. He became popular among Parisian Radicals for advocating universal male suffrage, rights for minorities (Jews, Protestants, Blacks), abolition of slavery and the death penalty. He also attained prominence in the newly formed Jacobin Club and played a major role in taking the nominally bi-partisan club to a radical direction after the Champ de Mars massacre.

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During the short lived constitutional monarchy, many revolutionaries, including the moderate Girondins, advocated going to war in order to spread the ideas of the French Revolution. Robespierre, who was not seated in the newly formed Legislative Assembly due to a rule that he pushed for which banned members of the National Assembly from serving in the new legislative body, took a hardline stance against the war. But his position was unpopular at the time, and war was declared and fully backed by the King and Queen (which Robespierre pointed out was enough reason to be skeptical of the entire project). He regained prominence after the August 10, 1792 Insurrection against the King, when he became one of many deputies elected, for the first time via universal male suffrage, to the National Convention.

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Robespierre's notoriety begins with his participation in the debate on the trial of King Louis XVI. He famously reversed his former protest against the death penalty, citing the King's treason as grounds for immediate summary execution and his death justifiable as a war measure. The mismanagement of the war and the mounting paranoia among Parisian street radicals led to bitter factionalism, culminating in a second insurrection against the Girondins, which made the Jacobins the majority party in the Convention. In the fifth year of his political career, Robespierre gained true political power as one of the 12 members (and the most publicly known and prominent) of the Committee of Public Safety. Citing wartime conditions, they suspended the newly written 1793 Constitution (the most radical document of The Enlightenment era) and instituted a policy they called "the Terror".

Robespierre was never actually the dictator or in any way the sole leader of France. He was the intellectual and moral backbone for the Committee while it ran the country; however, his influence within the Committee was subject to the machinations of other members and tended to ebb and flow. While he is usually portrayed (and not without reason) as the personification of the worst excesses of the Revolution, he actually fought as ferociously against radicals as he did royalists. He also played a role in recalling brutal and corrupt mission representatives such as Joseph Fouche, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, Jean-Lamber Tallien and Paul Barras. His own political position, while radical left, favored the emerging middle class of artisans and small businessmen (who he subsidized during the Terror), geared towards wealth redistribution and what we would call, today, the welfare state.

His paranoid, fastidious, self-righteous nature, increasing fanaticism and advocacy of a thin narrow path between extreme and moderate tendencies, led to a schism and fall-out with erstwhile Jacobin allies such as Hebert and in the case of Danton and Desmoulins, close personal friends, all of whom he sent to the guillotine. His downfall was the result of the fact that he had alienated virtually all his former allies — moderates, extremists, the National Convention, even the radical Paris Sections. The events of his downfall (occurring on 9 Thermidor of the French Revolutionary Calendar) has since become proverbial as Full-Circle Revolution. While it marked the end of the radical and violent phase, it also ended the reform and progressive initiatives undertaken in the same period (which included price ceilings, widespread government participation, meritocracy and the abolition of slavery). The largest mass execution in the Revolution happened the day after Robespierre's death, when 77 loyalists were guillotined in a single day.

In the aftermath, Thermidorians gave him and other radicals (which had formerly included themselves) a Historical Villain Upgrade as a "bloodthirsty dictator" that endures to this day. Already in the post-revolutionary era, later observers, from Cambaceres to Napoleon, (including the ones who turned on him such as Barere and Billaud-Varenne) questioned this narrative and noted how his reputation and influence was greatly exaggerated. Others such as Gracchus Babeuf, a Hebertist who had initially welcomed the "death of the tyrant", lamented how Poor Communication Kills, noting, "To awaken Robespierre is to awaken democracy itself."

A highly controversial person, Robespierre became in the 19th and early 20th Century the personification of the Knight Templar radical for whom Utopia Justifies the Means, combining personal probity (he was called "The Incorruptible" and it wasn't ironic in any way) with a vindictive, self-righteous streak. He became in Lord Acton's words, the most hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men. Later critics argue that Robespierre set a precedent for the likes of Vladimir Lenin and one of his most recent biographies is entitled "Fatal Purity." Other critics have questioned this reading and argue that his life and actions was subject to a smear campaign in the vein of Richard III, making him the The Scapegoat for revolutionary excesses. There are groups of historians and organizations who hope to rehabilitate his reputation to a more balanced level. The vast majority of fictional depictions, however, subject him to a Historical Villain Upgrade.

Tropes as portrayed in fiction:

The Dandy: Most portrayals of Robespierre often have him dressed like this, being that he was a real-life one. Unfortunately they take that and imply that he was a Sissy Villain and a wannabe aristocrat hypocrite which is slightly anachronistic, since dandies were stylist radicals who were finally dressing how they wanted rather than how society told them to dress.note The above portrait, the earliest in Robespierre's career, has him wearing the compulsory black outfit worn by all Third Estate delegates for the Estates General. It was only with the formation of the National Assembly that delegates could dress as they please, at which point Robespierre, an authentic clothes-horse, took advantage and really let loose.

Historical-Domain Character: As the most famous and well known of all revolutionaries outside France (eclipsing the likes of Lafayette, Mirabeau, Danton, Saint-Just and Marat), works about the Revolution tend to feature him or refer to him in some way or form.

Historical Hero Upgrade: It's incredibly uncommon of course, especially in Anglophone works. One surprising recent exception is Eric Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke (2001), where the film's lead Grace Elliot, an actual historical figure (a Scottish noblewoman trapped in France during the Terror), is hauled before the revolutionary tribunals and is harassed by one judge who wants to guillotine her, until Robespierre himself intervenes and tells the guy to do something useful and let her go.note The director Rohmer is generally conservative and critical of the Revolution, but also scrupulous in terms of historical fidelity, and he kept this scene because it actually did happen and indeed Robespierre often did intervene to protect some of the accused from the tribunals, as noted by Napoleon in his later years. It's telling that being accurate becomes this trope with regards to Robespierre.

Historical Villain Upgrade: In most works, especially adaptations of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which being that it's set during the Terror features him as the Greater-Scope Villain. 20th Century films on the Revolution especially after the 30s (The Black Book, Danton) tend to conflate Robespierre with fascist and communist dictatorships. The latter is understandable since the Soviet Union did look up to him and the Jacobins, though in the case of the former, it must be repeated that Robespierre was fairly anti-racist, whatever his other flaws.note Actual fascists incidentally loathed The French Revolution in general and Jacobinism and Robespierre by extension. Marechal Petain spent much of his time in power trying to reverse the Revolution and its iconography, while La Résistance featured two Maquis units named after Robespierre.

Shrouded in Myth: After his execution, Robespierre's personal papers and correspondence were burnt by the Thermidorians. Partly as a result, his public reputation remains buried by two centuries plus worth of misinformation.

Andrzej Wajda's Danton portrays Robespierre as a Stalin-like despot who demands that Jacques-Louis David remove pictures of political opponents from paintings. Others portray Robespierre personally ejecting Mirabeau from the Pantheon after learning of the latter's corruption. In either case, Robespierre effected no such policy of damnatio memoriae, and in the case of the latter, Mirabeau was removed from the Pantheon after Robespierre's downfall.

Works like Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chenier (especially a 2016 production) attributes a specious quote that Robespierre signed the death warrant of French poet Andre Chenier by saying "Even Plato banned the poets from his Republic". Not only has this quote not been traced to Robespierre, but Robespierre couldn't possibly have signed Chenier's death warrant since he was absent from the Committees for a month before his death and he had no direct hand in any of the executions in the month leading to his downfall and death.note Likewise Robespierre never advocated any official policy repressive of poets and artists, since Andre Chenier's brother Marie-Joseph Chenier was his personal friend and collaborator in the Festival of the Supreme Being, and of course one of his closest friends was the painter Jacques-Louis David, the greatest painter of that generation.

Utopia Justifies the Means: The common portrayal of an idealist who would kill to achieve his perfect world, an archetype that really took off in the Romantic era (as a scapegoat of the Enlightenment-inspired man), was highly inspired by memories of Robespierre and the Terror, which remains a byword for excessive idealism well into the 21st Century. This also inspires most fictional depictions, including Neil Gaiman's Thermidor, where Johanna Constantine accuses him of being ready to kill everyone in the world if they don't meet his ideals.

Not directly, but in Aviary Attorney it can be revealed that the character Jayjay Falcon, who changed his name to avoid recognition is his grandchild.

Naturally a central figure of Season 3 of Revolutions by Mike Duncan, as that season focuses on the French Revolution. He also makes a cameo appearance in Season 4 (the Haitian Revolution), as events in France had a major effect on what was happening in its colony (albeit on a six-week delay).

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